How I get in touch with Music Trackers

20 years ago I start to use Music Trackers. I still use today trackers and I am so thankful that some guys, long time ago, such things invented. Some of us are at some point in life, dreaming to do music, in some way, thinking how to do it, how to save songs ideas. In the 1990 I use to record tapes (casettes) using one Casettes Deck, and the music was generated with a keyboard piano with 128 instruments pressets and some rhythms, but the main problem was that, I had to record these things everytime live which was not a nice flow on creation.

My first contact with Music Trackers begins with year 1997 when I got my first Cyrix 6x86 (CPU 80 MHz, 32MRAM, HDD 500MB), thanks to my parents. And so, I discovered a new world, music made with computers. At that time was FT2 (Fasttracker) very famous, I think most of the time I was jumping between Norton Commander and FT2 in screen. FT2 was running very well on MS-DOS ( Win95 and Win98 ) and so, couple of years everything was fine.

Late, after year 2000, FT2 didn't work very smooth on MS-DOS in WinXP era. I had to search alternatives. Thinking back, was few DOS alternatives like ScreamTracker, Impulse Tracker, and meanwhile we had Win32 alternatives like ModPlugTracker and MadTracker. But none of these had FT2 feeling, at least for me. I guess that, end of 2006 or something, I found SkaleTracker and was huge love at first sight. Such a big love that, I still use today this Tracker after 10 years in paralel with MilkyTracker. SkaleTracker gave me back that comfort from FT2 cockpit, not to mention that it is able to use VST FX plugs or VSTi Synths. I like MilkyTracker too, because has that FT2 cockpit and is running fine on both OS, Linux and Windows, thing that I didn't archived yet on SkaleTracker :)

Last Tracker that captivate my attention 6 years ago was Renoise, good software, not free but also not expensive. The bad thing in Renoise was that did not let you export songs back in XM format, not to mention that from a version to another, the rns file structure was changed and tracker didn't allowed me to play songs made in some version and imported in other version. So, despite that I buy Renoise, I didn't touch that Tracker again.

Well, this is my story of using Music Trackers, from past till now. I will use Music Trackers as long as these softwares continue to exists, just because is more simple to create a song idea as pattern instead of opening complex midi-vst-vsti tools like FL, Cubase, Samplitude, Ableton Live , REAPER, Pro Tools, Reason, Sony Acid, Cakewalk or God knows what and forgeting the idea. The list from abobe is for professional studios and I am an music amateur :D

The next links are for those of you that want to get in touch with trackers FT2 alike.
I found some manuals for you and some instruments collection, check it out :)